Thursday, March 24, 2011

"The National Association of Scholars presents our fifth edition of the encyclopedia of sustainability (updated quarterly). Our periodically updated “sustainapedia” contains key names, terms, books, colleges and organizations that NAS has observed through our research of the sustainability movement in higher education. "

Monday, March 14, 2011

My apologies for not responding to all your very thoughtful comments to my last couple posts. I have no excuse other than I came down with a case of Iditamania and have been completely absorbed in the race! Until now, I never understood the passion people have for the Iditarod. I studied it, because of the auctions we held, but I wasn't ever what you could call a fan.

So, it's not over yet and the end is very exciting right now. John Baker, the first Coast Native who may ever win the Iditarod Trail Race is in the lead, so I'm still not going to respond to all of you, yet. But I do feel I need to address the comments coming in regarding what I said about my dad beating me up, and my brother's assurance to me that it was the right thing for Fred to do.

First of all, I said it somewhat figuratively. "Beat me up" was just a basic concept of how he reacted. I feel terrible that I mentioned it at all now, because it had a different meaning for me and my brother than it did for some readers.

There was a method to my dad's training and by the time I was a woman I understood and appreciated it. He was preparing me to do battle with some powerful enemies.

Explain to me why I'm the ONLY one who stood fast for the people in my neighborhood when the communitarians invaded in 1999. It took every ounce of courage and training Fred drilled into me to stand up to the police and the parade of lawyers and experts who attacked without warning. It was my dad telling me to get all the facts before I made a decision. It was Fred's daughter interrupting the meetings of the land use planners who were operating under the premise that our 4th and 5th Amendment Rights had been balanced. More often than not, I was completely alone at these crucial meetings, where communitarian liars like Jody Kretzman were plying their wares to an unaware and unsuspecting citizenry.

I didn't stop fighting for our rights just because the planners had more power and I could get "hurt." I didn't run and cower in a corner whining about what was happening to us, like many in my neighborhood did. The fact is most of my neighbors thought I was a fool for believing in American justice at all! Besides my daughter and siblings, nobody has ever completely understood why I was so willing to throw down 100% of my weight and hold the line.

My dad was a devoted American patriot of the old school. I was raised by a man who lived by his principles, right or wrong. So hell no, I didn't flinch when the Community cops got in my face and sneered and threatened me. The more the Seattle government tried to intimidate me, the braver and more determined I became. As the years passed and more insults and threats became the norm in my life, I didn't slink off and start writing romance novels. I got to work and built the biggest website about communitarian plans, programs, laws, theories, and players in the entire world. Then, because it took every waking moment to do this unfathomable lone feat, I went camping, made a camp that would have made my fastidious dad proud, just so that my overhead was low enough to keep me writing for the ACL.

You think people like me are born with the desire to help protect what's right and ours, for everyone and not just ourselves? No. My dad taught me to fight for all our freedom, because there's always someone who wants to steal it away. He taught me that strong people like us have to defend the weaker members of society because they cannot defend themselves.

Was he a tough son of a bitch? Oh yes he was. Did he treat us in ways that would cause his arrest today? Most certainly. But will you ever see the likes of me in the future generations you protect with your peaceful and loving child rearing laws? No, you won't.

My dad was a realist. He "proceeded by way of observation, not by way of illusion."

There were many, many honorable lessons too, for example, I wasn't allowed to hit women nor throw the first punch. Maybe it's not spiritual to say this, but life is brutal and not everyone wants to "get along." I have had more than one occasion to use my fighting skills in my own self defense, and unlike many women who come from poor working class NCO Army wages backgrounds, I can say I've never been raped. "No brag, just fact."

We can hope and pray all we want for a peaceful coexistence with everyone on the planet, but that's not going to stop LA21 and may actually be part of the way we've been duped into crying in our beer and wine while we watch our freedom get flushed down the toilet. This is WAR. It's very real. I think it's funny as hell that I am one of the few trained soldiers America has in the field, and some people think I should change my tactics and start preaching peace. Sorry, but I'd rather win (as in: not give in) this war against communitarian terrorism. What kind of peace agreement do you think we can get with murderers, liars and thieves who hide behind a veil of charity? What concept of peace would you have me expound on? Yours? or mine?

I can probably never explain our dad in a way gentle souls who are horrified by violence can understand. My brother knows that my father called me Tiger all my life, because we had a very special relationship based on shared core values. He helped me become the kind of person who is nice to everybody but will fight back and defend themselves or others in an unjustified attack, no matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes, even if it means certain death.

Know this: U.S. Army Retired Sgt Major Fred Friedrich is the only reason my research exists for you to use. We wrote Part One of the Anti Communitarian Manifesto, "What is the Hegelian Dialectic?" specifically for him in 2002. Part Two was written in 2003, specifically for the cowardly and seditious foreign military agent who founded the Communitarian Network, Dr. Amitai Etzioni.

A special hello to my brother and his co-workers down in Boise! Hold fast!

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

I grew up making lists. Did you? For my family it was a prerequisite for any plan we made. We learned to do it at a very young age. I've wasted thousands of pages for just lists alone. Lately, I can't open a binder without finding one of my daughter's lists. List making is one the traits I've obviously passed down to her. What else can I pass down, I wonder.

My grandson loves it when I make up stories for him. Next time I see him, maybe I'll tell him about making lists. We can play a little game starting with the words: If I had to walk out the door tomorrow and survive without any services provided by civilization, what would I take?

Then, if he likes the game, I'll tell him what grandma would hope to have packed and ready to pick up and go. I'd tell him what I'd want waiting for me in a pre-planned and already prepared secret spot. I'd make it exciting and tell him I'd build underground, into a hillside or deep inside a clean cave. He already knows that up here we'd have to run the bears out of the cave first.

I'd wish I could recite my fairytale list to him as if it were a poem. Cadence is easier to memorize and music helps the stories find a home in our hearts.

To my literal readers who choose to take this fairytale seriously, please note the big "if" in the game Q. I have by no means collected all of the things on my list. I'm too poor. But who knows, maybe you can afford it. Plus, this is an Alaskan winter list and people in warmer climates will not need some of these items but will need other things not on my list.

Lists are personal. Everyone has a different set of priorities. I'd like to be prepared for mountain living, as that may be all that's safe and available in many places. High mountain streams provide fresh water, glaciers provide summer ice, volcanoes and high wind areas discourage helicopter flyovers and landings. In the worst fairytale possible, we may not only want to be off the grid, but also choose to remain under the radar.

Many people have written to me over the past decade asking the same thing: What can we do? I spent the past five years camping in Alaska, devoting my quiet time to considering the best answer to that question. In the end, I never did answer it; I couldn't come up with one thing to recommend everyone do, or try to do. I always felt I had failed the readers in that aspect of my ACL work. Indeed, many people accused me of only identifying the problem. They were disappointed that I did not also have a solution to the problem I identified. My weak response to their complaints was always: I think all of us have to contribute original ideas to the solution.

I am not alone in my observations of current events or what I think could possibly happen. But I'm not one who hopes for it, on any level of my being. I'm one of those wackos who hoped and prayed it would never come to my having to escape to the real wilderness. I still never want it to become my reality. I know I would probably die if I had to do it. The "accidental" lesson I have learned here at Camp Redington, throughout all these final years of my written opposition to Amitai Etzioni's communitarian plan, is this: surviving without the benefits of modern civilization is almost too hard to contemplate.

My every waking moment I am grateful for my grid electricity, a phone line so I can talk to my daughter, for the internet, connected to the phone line, so I can talk to my son in real time, a U.S. Marine stationed in Hawaii and heading for Afghanistan. Every day I thank the Good Creator for our being alive. Then, for having a refrigerator for cold milk, a chainsaw and the gas and oil to keep it running, my pile of wood, and the clean fresh water from our community well. I wouldn't want to live without my electric espresso machine for my morning latte.

I never, and I mean never want to see us lose what our fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers left to us. They hoped but we know life can be good. Modern things are wonderful, they enrich our lives and without a doubt make it easier. We will all be much better off finding a way to keep all of it available and accessible. It would be complete neglect to not pass our accumulated human achievements down to future generations. The survival of our progeny depends on it.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

I haven't felt much like writing lately. Sometimes the whole focus of my research just seems so pointless and I lose incentive. And I'm so tired of being broke and living like this I just have to start making money, and I'd rather make it by doing something legitimate.

As I move forward with my Gertee book and building project, I continually hear suggestions to "get a grant" or a government contract for creating emergency housing options. I totally qualify, they tell me, so I should do it. Silly me, I always politely decline such sage advice and remind people that I am opposed to making deals with the same people I have opposed and written about since 1999. I remind them that it's the grant funded orgs that are destroying our country.

Even people who have read my work for years will respond, "But you need help, don't you?"

It's always been as if my difficult choice to go without and to live so frugally (and dangerously some might add) is just some quirky thing I do because I enjoy suffering! My inability to get assistance in these grant inspired times proves to my countrymen that I am inept and deserving of the poverty and ridicule I endure.

So what a joy it was to read this forward from our good buddy Pete! Thanks Griz! It might not make my American friends happy to read about how enslaved they've become, but it makes me feel great! Some of us do understand that all the sacrifices I've made were the only choices I could make based on my principles and understanding of what it means to be an American.

Reprinted without permission from the author.

Living the outlaw lifeTo hell with freedom!

By Claire Wolfe

So here I sit, facing a tough deadline. It’s my job in life (and in this article) to give readers practical ideas for how to live free. I’m supposed to engage enthusiasm. Concoct creative concepts. Inspire glorious disobedience to all that’s stultifying, bureaucratically burdensome, and contrary to the way good, contrary Americans like to live.

But you know what? I don’t wanna.

To heck with it. Freedom’s too hard, as readers have been informing me for years. And hey, 285 million Americans can‘t be wrong. So I’m going to go write romance novels instead. TV scripts. Yeah, that’s the thing, sitcom episodes.

I mean, look at it. What’s the big deal about freedom that makes it worth all that effort?

Freedom’s a nice luxury, of course. If you were free you wouldn’t be a dependent, a collaborator, or a victim of an aggressive government. You’d be able to live and think as you saw fit, as long as you respected others right to do the same. Your life wouldn’t be dedicated to “compliance” (or else) with any old random order written by any old random bureaucrat. You’d support the causes and people you value, not the causes and people some interest group wants to force you to support with your money, your labor, and your life.

Wow, what a rush that would be.

But you can‘t do that, these days. They won‘t let you. So why even try? And look at all the reasons not to try!

Freedom is dull. If you want to be free you have to understand the principles of freedom. You have to read boring old documents like the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, The Anti-Federalist Papers, Common Sense, and intellectual tomes that are thick with old-fashioned words by Locke, Montesquiue, de Tocqueville, Bastiat, von Mises, and people like that.

If you don’t, then your grasp of freedom will never go beyond some insubstantial thing like “freedom is whatever feels good” or worse, “freedom is what the politicians tell us we have in America.” And that’ll get you exactly nowhere.

So you gotta study. But face it, none of those dead philosophers could hold a candle to Danielle Steele when it comes to prose. Du-u-u-l!

You’ve also got to keep track of laws and regulations even if (maybe especially if) you don’t plan to obey them. You’ve got to know what’s coming at you so you can fight it or dodge it.

That means you have to spot in advance when “health-care privacy regulations” are actually going to create a giant federal database with information about your hemorrhoids, nose-picking, flatulence, vaginal infections, depression, or drug abuse. Or when some teeny clause in some “moderate, common-sense” bill to “close the gun-show loophole” might end up creating a federal record of everybody who ever even sets foot in the door of a gun show.

Even when some politician hits your particular happy buttons – like “curbing illegal immigration” (Yeah, we gotta stop those people from stealing good American jobs!) – you’ve got to be on the lookout for the inevitable consequences. Consequences like national ID cards, asset forfeiture, random checkpoints, and pilot programs to keep you, Mr. or Ms. Whole-Wheat America -- not just those brown-skinned guys -- from getting a job without prior federal permission. Politicians bury that stuff deep, deep, deep -- way down where the friendly news reporters don’t look. (And why should you go to all the bother of finding out, if people who are paid to keep watch on government don‘t? If you thought reading Tocqueville was dull, wait till you read Feinstein, Hatch, Schumer, McCain, or Feingold.)

In your private life, freedom means taking full responsibility for your own actions. I hardly need to mention what a drag that is. In a free country you’d have to pay the consequences of your screwups unless someone voluntarily bailed you out. (And I mean voluntarily in the old sense, not in the NewSpeak sense of “Do it voluntarily or we’ll hurt you.”)

That is just not the modern American way. Playing Tomb Raider is far more entertaining.

Freedom is risky, besides. And the risks are everywhere. Try exercising even itty-bitty freedoms and the jackboots can come marching right into your most private life.

If you think it’s more dangerous than helpful to vaccinate your children, the government might just take your kids away. They certainly won’t let them into school (schools you paid for with your tax dollars).

Drive within a thousand feet of a school with a gun in your vehicle and you can get five years in the federal lockup – even if you don’t know the school or the gun is there. (And if great champions of liberty like the NRA, G.W. Bush, and John Ashcroft actually want the feds to crack down harder on that kind of “gun crime,” well, maybe we‘re just wrong to get so upset about it. Maybe, like our congressmen keep telling us, we really don‘t understand how things are done in Washington.)

Don’t wear a seat belt and you might go to jail. Heck, be a bad enough seat-belt scofflaw and you could get shot dead, like Timothy Thomas, that kid in Cincinnati whose shooting by a police officer was the trigger for all those riots last May. Thomas had warrants for a variety of traffic infractions, including several seat-belt violations. Oh, sure, it’s not nice to run from a cop, which Thomas did. It’s dumb to the tenth power. But when did we end up in the kind of country where failure to wear a seat belt, coupled with a fast sprint, merits the death penalty?

Okay, bad example. Thomas was a black scofflaw in the inner city. He was “them,” not “us,” and I can just hear some lawnorder reader snorting, “He made the cop shoot him. He asked for it.”

Middle class white folks are somewhat safer when they try to exercise the occasional random freedom.

We can “merely” go to jail for refusing to landscape our property exactly as the Zoning Nazis demand, as golf-course owner John Thoburn did this year in Virginia. We can lose our home to – believe it or not – a provision of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, as Dianna Luppi did after she dared fight the U.S. Forest Service, which tried to make her pay for a right-of-way that had been free for more than 100 years. We can get hit with huge fines, as race-car driver and sports commentator Bobby Unser was, merely because he might have crossed into a federal wilderness on his snowmobile while trying to save himself and a friend in a blizzard.

But as long as we don’t follow any really weird religions or express unpopular ideas, our rulers probably won’t send people to shoot us in the back for doing stuff like that. We should be very grateful to them, don’t you think?

Still, the safest thing is to comply with their rules. Assuming you can figure what the rules are this week.

Freedom is a money-losing proposition. People who truly value freedom don’t merely read about it or grouse about the lack of it. They do their utmost best to live it. And this, I must tell you from bitter experience, isn’t an “economically viable” proposition.

For example, if you really oppose tyranny, you won’t pay to support it. That might mean working in the underground economy – which, unless you’re a major drug dealer or can catch the next big illegal trend (cigarette smuggling, maybe?), means living narrowly. For other people, it might mean choosing an Atlas Shrugged life, staying legal, but earning very little money and giving the smallest possible portion of your efforts to the state. In either case, you and your family do without while others prosper.

And people who really believe in freedom also avoid tax-funded goodies – grants, low-interest loans, housing subsidies, farm subsidies, Medicare, Medicaid, government jobs, Social Security, and all the rest.

But man, that means you lose! Everybody else indulges. So, like the cynics say, why not “just get back your own”? Don’t worry about the principle of the thing. Pay up, then suck up. Big Mama DC‘s tit is there for you, too. Grabbing on is much less work, and much more lucrative, than standing on impractical principles in this crazy, old world. Get with the program, people.

Freedom makes you a freak. Us freedom-lovin’ fools – and fools we certainly are – used to think that if we could just alert people to the dangers of government everybody would stand up and fight. If we could just show them the evil that lies at the end of all the claims of “for your own good,” “for the children.” “for standardization of records,” and “for public health and safety,” they’d wake up and bite and claw like tigers for freedom.

Well, hahaha on us. Turns out all that ordinary middle- and working-class Americans really want is – guess what? -- entitlements of their own. As long as they get cheap pharmaceuticals, scholarships for little Brittannee and Joshuah, government contracts, grants, subsidized energy, and pork delivered to their district by willing, vote-buying politicians, they could care less about some nebulous abstraction like “freedom.”

They’ll even barter the kiddies for government perks. If you want tax deductions and credits, submit your kiddies to a federal citizen-tracking number at birth, the feds say. Here‘s my firstborn son, American‘s reply. And take my daughter, too, while you‘re at it. (When conscience-stricken parents, concerned about the life they might be condemning their child to, ask me how high the tax deduction should be before it’s “worth” it to tattoo infants with a tracking number, I tell them the standard fee for that transaction is 30 pieces of silver.) You earned the money in the first place! Why should you have to sell your children to get it back? Ah, but there goes the dumb freedom fighter talking again …

If people are willing to trade freedom for goodie-filled baskets of tyranny, they positively crave tyranny when they hope it’ll hurt someone else. Sure, let’s have “sentence enhancements” for rag-head terrorists, dopers, and inner-city gang-bangers. Never mind that those “enhancements” might one day hit their own kids. That’s all just theoretical. Paranoid nonsense. Only alarmists talk like that. (Whoda thunk that when the original “drug czar,” Harry Anslinger, was telling tales to Congress back in the 1930s about the “100,000 … Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers” in the U.S. whose marijuana smoking “causes white women to seek sexual relations” with them that someday Anslinger’s laws would be used to lock up the grandkids of all those middle-class white folks who drooled gleefully over Anslinger’s salacious horror stories”?)

Sure, let’s have all the government in the world -- as long as it’s to our momentary benefit.

Yep, that’s us all over. And who wants to be perceived like that? Better to go with the flow. Forget those unfashionably goofy principles. Go along to get along.

Freedom’s a hopeless cause. You know it. I know it. Every time you turn around, they’ve got some new surveillance device. Some new regulation. Some new database. Some new punishment. Geez, these days, thanks to Deadbeat Dad tracking you can’t even get a fishing license without a federal government ID number.

Try to resist these things and … well, heck, you can’t drive, can’t get a job, can’t open a bank account, can’t get a credit card (and of course you‘ve just gotta have credit cards). You‘ll end up on some enforcement agencies‘ list -- and that‘s something nobody but a fool would welcome.

We hardly need to make things worse for ourselves by fighting some big, noble loser of a battle. Right?

Anyway, how can anybody expect one person, one ordinary little citizen, to fight anything so big? It’s unreasonable. Yes, indeed. Nobody can be expected to take on an adversary as big as the federal government (not to mention all those other governments, state, county, city, regional, global, public-private partnerships and that new thing they’ve imported from Europe, the “quasi-governmental organization”). And who are we to go against what the majority wants? How can we be arrogant enough to imagine that our pathetic little efforts might actually make a difference?

Tom Paine and Patrick Henry and guys like that … well, they lived in a different time. It was probably easier for them.

We’ll just have to adjust. Learn to live with it. It won’t be so bad. And after all, it’s all for our own good.

Okay, maybe there’s one reason to bother with freedom. Just one.

Because if you don’t free yourself you’ll be a nice, comfortable, happy slave. If you don’t fight for freedom your children will be slightly less comfortable slaves, wearing their little ID-number tattoos under their skin as they walk past the retina-scanners and body x-rays to go to work, submitting numbly as robots armed with pain rays arrest them after computers diagnose their “suspicious“ behavior patterns, stumbling through their therapeutically controlled lives. Your dependency, your collaboration, your tacit agreement with the goals of tyrants will have made it inevitable.

And your grandchildren will …

But hey, that’s their problem, right? Let the little bastards take care of themselves. As long as you get what’s coming to you, make a few bucks, don’t make waves, and lead a nice, comfortable life, who cares?

Hey, has anybody seen my copy of TV Guide? I think they’re re-running my favorite episode of “Sex and the City” tonight.

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I'm Niki Raapana, an independent researcher, co-founder of the Anti Communitarian League (ACL) with Nordica Friedrich, co- author of 2020: Our Common Destiny and co-author of the Anti Communitarian Manifesto.